Site performance and user experience are probably the most important factor that affects how your site will be positioned on search engines. Site speed has long been one of the most valued aspects of site performance. Usually, performance is synonymous with speed, mainly because these are the most noticeable features of a website. If the page loads quickly, users are happy. If it’s slow to load, there’s a good chance you’ll lose a potential customer forever. Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in the overall user experience of a website.

Google has confirmed that Core Web Vitals will become search engine ranking signals from May 2021.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are the data necessary to improve website performance, user experience and, most importantly, search rankings.

image source: blog.chromium.org

Google has indicated that there are three factors that most affect the user experience: Largest Contentful Paint , First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift . Core Web Vitals are designed to measure how users perceive the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of each page.

• Largest Contentful Paint: Time taken to load the main content of the page. The ideal LCP time is 2.5 seconds or faster. In other words: the time from clicking on a link to displaying most of the content on the screen. LCP focuses on what really matters when it comes to page speed: the ability to view and interact with your page. Guidelines on how to optimize this parameter can be found here.
• First Input Delay : the time required for the page to become interactive. The ideal time is less than 100ms. FID therefore measures the time it takes for a user to actually interact with your page. Google considers FID important because it takes into account how real-life users interact with sites.
• Cumulative Layout Shift : The amount of unexpected shift in the appearance of the page’s visual content. The ideal score is less than 0.1. If the elements on your page move while the page loads, then you have a high CLS. Which is bad.

From Google , these signals are briefly defined as follows: ” These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with the website and contribute to our continuous work to ensure that people get the most useful and pleasant experiences from the Internet. “

How important are these parameters?

It is important to emphasize that a good page experience rating will not magically get you to the top spot on Google . In fact, Google has been quick to point out that page experience is one of several (approximately 200) factors they use to rank sites in search. If you have been well positioned for keywords that mean something to you, and your site provides a good user experience, we believe that there will be no tectonic changes . But let’s wait until May to see how it all works out.

Google offered 6 ways to check Core Web Vitals . In each of these tools, you can get an analysis of the preformasni site, as well as very important and useful instructions on what and how you can improve and correct, in order to improve the Core Web Vitals on your site. Google is working to add tags to search results that show which results provide a good page experience.

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